The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Sempra Energy (NYSE: SRE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 2000.

SRE 20-Year Return Details

Start date:

05/01/2000

$10,00005/01/2000

$138,50204/28/2020

End date:

04/28/2020

Start price/share:

$18.12

End price/share:

$126.96

Starting shares:

551.72

Ending shares:

1,090.54

Dividends reinvested/share:

$42.40

Total return:

1,284.55%

Average annual return:

14.04%

Starting investment:

$10,000.00

Ending investment:

$138,502.25

As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.04%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $138,502.25 today (as of 04/28/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1,284.55% (something to think about: how might SRE shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 20 years, Sempra Energy has paid $42.40/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 4.18/share, we calculate that SRE has a current yield of approximately 3.29%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.18 against the original $18.12/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 18.16%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:“Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I’ve made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action.” — Jim Rogers